If a mattress is not protected, then when the mattress gets soiled, it may stain, and such stains can be very difficult, if not impossible, to remove. If such an unprotected mattress continues to be soiled and stained, it can generate a permanent odor that creates an unpleasant and unhealthy sleeping environment and, eventually, the mattress will become unusable and will need to be replaced. Mattresses are expensive, and to have to replace them prematurely due to soiling and staining becomes very costly.
Mattress pads have been around for a long time and are effective at helping protect a mattress from getting soiled or stained when a bedtime accident occurs (e.g. when a child wets his bed, when a child is sick in bed, when a person is incontinent and has a bedtime accident, etc.). However, such standard mattress pads can be inconvenient to use, cumbersome to deal with and difficult to change when most bedtime incidents occur—during the middle of the night. With a standard mattress pad, when an accident occurs during the middle of the night, the bed linens and mattress pad have to be removed and changed so the person in the bed can get back to sleep. Although the task of changing the bed linens and mattress pad may be quite simple and straight-forward during the day when no one is sleeping in the bed and there is no mess to clean up, it becomes a much more difficult and tedious task during the middle of the night when the caregiver or parent has been awoken from their sleep. First, the person sleeping in the bed has to be removed from the bed and, if necessary, cleaned up. If the sleeping person is elderly with limited mobility, this can be a very difficult and, possibly, messy task. Then, once the bed linens and mattress pad have been removed, the caregiver or parent has to remake the bed and get the person who had been sleeping in the bed back into bed.
Prior patents, such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,570,026 to Allison and U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,922,565 and 5,086,530 to Blake, disclose easily changeable top layers for use with cribs. However, such prior patents do not discuss or suggest using multiple moisture proof layers in a sheet assembly to provide continuing protection to the mattress, even after the top layer of the sheet assembly has been soiled and removed.
Accordingly, there is a need for a mattress protector that provides multiple layers of protection so that if a top moisture proof layer gets soiled, it can be easily removed, and the mattress protector will continue to protect the mattress while a user continues to use the mattress.